Butterbees and Bumbleflies

To say this hasn’t really been my week isn’t a totally accurate statement.  But to say that it has been a series of events that have brought me to my knees would be entirely true.

I honestly don’t remember anything noteworthy on Monday.  We went to the library and got new books (Little Blue Truck is back in our house and once again I’m thinking maybe I should just find this book and buy it so we can read it every single day the rest of Becca’s life… I swear, if you have young kids, you’ve GOT TO FIND THIS BOOK!!!), went to the post office, took my friend Jessica to lunch for her birthday, and went to Target for Becca to spend a gift card she received for her birthday.  She took a good nap, I did some work, did laundry, and went to our church design committee meeting.  Got a few mosquito bites, but all in all, it was your basic, run of the mill, ordinary day.  I think God knew I’d need ordinary on Monday.

Then Tuesday came and we met up with a good friend from MOPS and her twins at Sea World (which I have a feeling is about to become a regular thing since we both live close and have annual passes!  YAY!).  We had a great time and even got to see Big Bird!!  (Which was WAY more exciting to me than to Becca.  Since Big Bird isn’t in the show, I had no idea that they even have a Big Bird, and it was pretty cool to finally meet my childhood hero!!!!!!!)  Cody ended up with a teleconference and had to stay late, so I cooked dinner after Becca went to bed.  Enter the eggs.

I had decided to fix breakfast for dinner.  I had Grands biscuits in the oven, broken up sausage frying in a pan with some scrambled eggs, and hashbrowns in veggie oil in the cast iron.  I have one of those clever little hotpad handle covers (like at the fancy restaurants that bring you fajitas on a sizzling hot plate that for some reason has a funky little handle and they have to cover it up so you don’t burn yourself on it), so I’m holding the handle and using my bamboo spoon (seriously, why I wasn’t using a spatula, I’ll never know) to turn the hashbrowns.  SO, some of them got stuck to the bottom of the pan (because apparently it’s too hard for me to oil my pan properly so that it stays a nonstick pan…) and I proceed to start scraping them off.  With my bamboo spoon.  While the oil is bubbling and boiling away.  And of course, I sloshed that boiling oil onto my left hand (remember, it’s over there holding onto the handle for dear life) and completely soaked it – from the base of each finger (except somehow my pinky area escaped), all the way down to the right side of my wrist and up my arm a ways.  Instant burn.  Instant ouch.  Instant tears in my eyes.  The first thing that popped in my mind was to wash it off.  So I ran to the faucet and got cold water over it immediately.  I put some soap and made sure all the oil was off so the burning would cease.  Then I thought of eggs.  I remembered reading an article about a woman who saved a burn victim by putting raw eggs on his burn.  Granted, this guy had been burned by fire, and it was on his face, but the whole moral to the story was that raw eggs can save your skin in the case of a large burn.  And bless their little hearts, the eggs had not yet marched their carton back into the refrigerator – they were sitting there on the counter just calling to me.  So I grabbed one, cracked it open with my non-burned hand, and dumped it on top of my hand, and smeared it in.  I won’t say the relief was instant, because I was in some SERIOUS pain, ya’ll.  But within a minute or less, the ouchy was done.  It was super fun to finish cooking with only the use of one hand (you can’t wash the eggs off – you have to let them form the protective coating on the skin), but man, I’ve never been so thankful for eggs!  By the morning, you couldn’t ever tell I had been burned.  Not even a sign of red on my skin.  There was one little white spot that looked like it might blister that remained, but by Wednesday night, even that was gone.  A miracle.  In a tiny little shell.  Thank God for eggs.

Fast forward to Wednesday.  If you’ve ever had a day that you want to never really repeat, this was that day.  Life just didn’t go my way.  But through all of it, my baby girl was super sweet and so I decided that for our afternoon snack I’d make us some ice cream.  (It’s super simple, ya’ll.  Just take some frozen fruit, pour in some milk – we use unsweetened vanilla coconut milk, and blend it in your food processor.)  So I did.  I used pineapple, banana, and strawberry and OMG it was fabulous!  We enjoyed sitting on the front porch swing in the heat eating our ice cream.  Good times.

But ya’ll didn’t come to read about my week.  I know why you are here.  You wanna know about the Great Pyrex Explosion of 2013 (as it will forever will be remembered).  So here we go.  It started out with me painstakingly cooking chicken (in the microwave in my Ridged Baker from Pampered Chef!), putting it in the mixer bowl, shredding it with the mixer, combining it with superfine chopped onion and mild green chilis and a whole package of shredded Mexican blend cheese.  Then I mixed in a separate bowl a can of cream of chicken soup with a large container of sour cream.  I very carefully put the chicken mixture into tortillas and rolled them, placing them in a glass dish (so I could take pictures to share with ya’ll.. this is all ya’ll’s fault, by the way), then covered them with cream mix, and topped with another entire package of shredded cheese.  I covered the dish with aluminum foil to keep the cheese from burning (fully realizing I’d lose some cheese that would stick to the foil), and poked tiny air escape holes in the foil.  Then I put that dish into a pre-heated 350F oven.  I had already started cooking my rice in the Pampered Chef Microwave Rice Cooker, so I got out a small pan, opened a can of refried beans, added some salsa to it, and turned them on.  All the while, my little cherub was playing in her high chair with wooden spoons and cornmeal, and making a lovely mess everywhere while watching Handy Manny on the dvr.  Life was good.  The troubles of the day were over.  Cody would be home soon and we’d have a fabulous family dinner, play in her room together, and then after she went to bed, we’d probably lay on the couch and watch The Big Bang Theory.

But that’s when The Big Bang became far more than a theory.  It looked like the entire top oven jumped.  (And maybe it did).  I knew immediately what had happened, but I couldn’t believe it.  I mean, we’ve all heard of Pyrex exploding, but that won’t ever happen to ME, not with a dish full of my great labor of love!  (As if it would explode empty…)  So, my first thought was, I’ll pull them out and put them in another dish.  HA!  That’s when I LOOKED in the oven.  Glass was EVERYWHERE.  Still, I thought, maybe…. So I started to slowly open the oven door (I had of course turned off the oven by this point)… and that’s when it popped more, and lots MORE glass fell to the bottom of the oven.  By now cheese was stringing downward… it was a super lovely sight.  And then I saw.  The entire length of the dish was broken.  I had no way of knowing if there was glass in the food.  I’d have to just count the entire meal as a loss.  I couldn’t risk feeding one of us a shard of glass.  Not worth it.  Not at all.

Cody got home and in his typical calm way, held me while I whined.  I didn’t actually ever cry over this loss.  I was too mad to cry.  It was just one more thing to add to the day from somewhere far further South than Heaven.  Then he proceeded to clean it up.  All of it.  He even got out the shop vac, and after he’d vaccumed out the oven and the floor in front of it, he cleaned up all of Becca’s lovely cornmeal play mess.  That’s what a good guy he is.  I loaded all the millions of dishes that had gone into preparing our meal into the sink to be dealt with today at some point.  I packed away the refried beans and the rice for our meal tomorrow night (yup, I’m actually going to attempt to make them again… I want chicken enchiladas, ya’ll!  BUT tomorrow night’s will be going in my Rectangular Baker from Pampered Chef!!), fed Becca some randomness that was in the fridge, and after she went to bed, pulled out the Totino’s pizzas from the freezer, baked them (in the bottom oven just b/c I was paranoid about the explosive properties of the top oven), and we watched the TBS Big Bang Theory marathon.  So, at least that went according to plan.

What a day.  What a week.  I have no idea what today holds, but seriously, it can’t be worse than yesterday.  Seriously.  It can’t.  Not possible.  So, since we’re on the uphill climb, I’m looking forward to seeing what today brings.

Bring it on.

It’s a name spoken frequently in our house. Bless her heart, this baby girl loves her dada with such a fierce love. It’s so awesome to see her excitement when he gets home from work, but also heatbreaking to see how much she misses him some days. Today is one of those days. She’s asked “Dada?” Probably 20 times.

Some days like yesterday, her mind thinks of him as her protector. She SCREAMED Dada at the top of her lungs over and over as I attempted to clip her fingernails. (I swear, why couldn’t God have made them only start growing after age 5 when you can actually reason with the child and explain that they truly will not feel a thing???). And as if Dada wouldn’t be making her get her nails clipped? She does the same thing if she gets in trouble- she calls out for Dada. Thankfully we are on the same page about discipline!

Other days she laughs his name when she has secretly remembered something funny he did. It’ll be a random moment where she just suddenly busts into laughter and then says “dada, dada!” Some inside secret between the two of them must be absolutely hilarious.

Then there are the mournful cries. Before she could even say “dada” we had moments where I could just tell, and now I know for sure. She has a mournful cry when noone but Daddy can fill the missing part in her soul. Today she was wanting to lay in her bed, so I picked her up, put her in, covered her with her blanket, and gave her her water cup. She rolled over to look at me, and just burst into tears. She had asked for him multiple times this morning. But in that moment, she just needed her Dada! I walked out and she stopped, and has since commensed playing and laughing with George, her stuffed monkey. But occasionally I hear her say “dada” as she talks to George and I know that tonight when Dada gets home, I’ll have the happiest little girl in the whole world because our family will once again be complete.

One of my favorite pics of my two loves- Becca and her Dada.